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Saturday, June 9, 2007

The Ducks Stanley Cup clinching victory over the Ottawa Senators drew a big rating in Buffalo. From Alan Pergament:

Buffalo might be the only market in America that gets higher ratings for the Stanley Cup finals than the NBA Finals on ABC despite the hype brought about by James’ legendary performance. The ratings in Buffalo for the Stanley Cup finals were five to 10 times the national ratings. Anaheim’s seriesclinching victory had an 11.7 rating here, about five times the national overnight rating.

The game drew a 2.5 rating nationally. The LA market peaked at an impressive (relatively) 10.4 figure. The overall average was a 6.0 (12 share) which, after taking the West Coast time zone issues into account, isn't that bad. Buffalo was in all likelihood the highest rated American market for all 5 games.

Wednesday, June 6, 2007

Bettman probably won't be pleased with this. Game 3 managed to tie a West Wing rerun for the worst rating for a prime-time show ever on NBC.

Of course, that ignores the fact that Canada has a vested interest in the series and the NHL does get the shaft in terms of having 20% of its markets ignored. Cities with teams are almost always more interested in league games. (See: the NBA's popularity in Buffalo) The game drew 2,553,000 viewers on CBC and an additional 646,000 viewers on RDS (Quebec). Canada likes to do things differently (zed, centre, favourite, metric system, twooneys) and puts their figures in terms of total viewers and not households. Some quick math tells me that if Canadians counted towards American ratings Game 3 would have garnered a 3.31 rating, which is still pretty pathetic.

As bad as it sounds, NBC is still making money on the contract. Then again the contract states NBC doesn't pay anything unless they make money. The bottom line is the NHL will never draw a huge rights fee that buoys the other major pro sports leagues unless something drastically changes.